Friday, September 12, 2008

Dealing With a Sad Reality

There are but 10 Regular Season home games left at Shea Stadium, although should the Mets finish strong and move into the Playoffs, Shea Stadium will live a bit longer. Yesterday, I recieved, as I'm sure all of my fellow 7-pack holders did, an e-mail regarding Playoff tickets. This has always worked out great for me; it certainly beats having to search things out on the secondary market or taking my chances through the random online drawing to be able to sniff a Playoff game at Shea. Thanks to this, I'm guaranteed at least one, and perhaps two playoff games, and one final trip to Shea before the building is but a memory.

Since we're on that topic...

Only about a week ago did I resign myself to the fact that I wasn't going to be able to get in to the final regular season game at Shea. I passed on the "Shea Goodbye" pack, impractical since I could only get to a few of the games, didn't win the online drawing, and couldn't finagle any other connections. But I still held out hope, after all, tickets are always plentiful on StubHub, etc. Surely, there would be a way. But with the tickets for that game bottoming out at $100 a pop for Section 48, Row Q, I drew the line. I figured I would keep checking, and wait it out. Surely, the prices would come down as the Summer drew on.

The available seats became better, but the prices held. I spoke with El Guapo and SVB about it. Their ceiling was even lower than mine. I kept looking. Still, no drop, no $50 miracle. So, last week, I decided to give up the ship. Sad and unfair as it may be, after 21 seasons and, to date, 261 regular season games at Shea, I'm afraid I'm going to be absent for the final one.

There's still time, I suppose, and there are still 6 regular season games that I will be able to go to (that's not saying that I'm going to all 6, I'll be at at least 1) before the season comes to a close. But it seems, to me at the very least, a letdown that I've been priced out like this. It's starting already. So, I save my money for the Postseason, which isn't guaranteed. I save for next season, and an almost certain price increase. But for one day, and one grand sendoff, I'm not going to be in the building.